Plays

The Old Man

A play in Two Acts, by Dorothy Macardle

OVERVIEW

Playwright

Setting

Dublin - the Parlour of a house on Wood Quay.
Time: the night of May 26th-27th, 1848.

Notes

According to Cathy Leeney (' Irish Women Playwrights, 1900-1939': Peter Lang, 2010), the original manuscript for 'The Old Man' has never been found. The same is true of many of Macardle's plays, possibly, as Leeney suggests, because her personal papers were destroyed by her younger brother after her death in 1958.

Synopsis

A two-act play set on the eve of the deportation of Young Irelander and failed rebel leader John Mitchel to to Australia. When three firebrand youths attempt to stage a last minute rescue and spark another insurrection, the elderly grandfather of one of them, himself a former idealist and a veteran of Robert Emmet's disastrous rising in 1803, attempts to use his widom and experience to reason them out of it. The play draws attention to the inevitable conflict of idealism and pragmatism at the heart of the Irish nationalist movement.